I am going to try not to overstate it, but, if this isn’t your first tonydegenaropoetrydotcom blog post, you know that’s a fool’s errand for me. I of course will overstate it. Strap in.

Rachel & I are moving home.

I can’t even let that hang as simple a sentence as it is. “Rachel & I are moving home” could mean anything or it could mean nothing. We’ve had so many places: Mississippi, Northern California, Southfield, Livonia, our parents’ houses, my uncle’s house. Columbus, really, is the least of our-places out of all of our places.

We had too short a time at Otterbein and then we both left.

Thank god we came home, not a location but to each other, because we of course came to be miles and miles and miles apart.
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But now we’re going Home. To our families. To our friends. To their children!
In other words:

Listening to Panda Bear's third solo album, and first real critical hit, Person Pitch which came out on this day in 2007 is like stepping into a time machine. But, like, a time machine that goes back to a less efficient machine era. Also, a much bitchier era for me personally.

It would be disingenuous for me to celebrate the 15 year milestone for a few reasons. First of all, a lot of digital ink has been spilled on Person Pitch and most of it far better and far more musically and technically literate than I could ever be, so instead, let me tell a story about this album that has literally nothing to do with this album.

I’m applying to jobs right now, so I’ve typed in the words “Otterbein university” and clicked that I graduated in 2012 so many times recently that they’ve become meaningless. Reflex. Like Tim Henman’s nasty backhand on the tennis court (be that winning the Paris Masters on indoor carpet or on a flat screen tv in Virtual Tennis 4 on Neil Brown’s Sega Dreamcast) the flick of the fingertip striking left mouse to condense four years of my life into a data point for an HR stooge to vet, if I’m lucky, to then pass on to English, Writing, Rhetoric & Composition, and Humanities departments and programs all over the Great Lakes region of the Midwest. Four of the most important years of my life, some keystrokes, an autofill entry, entry on a drop-down menu.

Keystrokes, autofill, drop-down menu. Keystroke. Autofill. Drop-down menu. Four of the most important years of my life, three clicks away from what is currently the central focus, the summation, of not only the four years of my time in undergrad by everything beyond that: San Francisco’s poetry adventure, working as an adjunct at University of Michigan Dearborn, my Ph.D. program. Half a life of school and work crammed into a blink-and-you-miss-it section of a document.
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But that’s been the year, that’s the game, the real rise-and-grind mindset isn’t driving ostentatious foreign cars, it keeping your nose down and leaning on the memory of the good times you’ve boiled down into line items on a CV to carry onto the next good time. God willing, you can hang onto that good time a little longer than the last good time. In higher education, its tough to find firm footing, let alone plan some roots.

But that’s okay because sometimes the roots go ahead and walk with you.

Falling in love with a band means a lot of firsts: there’s the first song you hear by them (“Welcome Home” in the Rock Band video games, also, any alternative rock radio station from 2005 to 2008), the reluctant “okay I’ll track it” tracks from the seasoned band veteran putting you on to something magical (“Blood Red Summer” and “A Favor House Atlantic,” all-knowing Bryan), or later the first album they put out once you’ve become a fan (Year of the Black Rainbow). There’s the first time you saw the band (Starland Ballroom, 2009), the first time you play a song that passes the band onto yet another new fan (“Gravemakers & Gunslingers”), and many, many more. The worst is the first time you outgrow a beloved t-shirt, but that’s a story for another time.
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One of the best firsts with a new band is when you discover with an album that feels like your own discovery. Not the superfan’s patient curation of playlists and mix CDs, not the consensus favorite album, not the latest. The first album you really, truly connect with, which is this case is also Coheed & Cambria’s debut album, Second Stage Turbine Blade, which turned twenty years old today.

The ubiquitous melody on all the Amory Wars records is first plucked at the opening and closing, truly, a moment that shapes the rest of the moments to come.

​Part 1: We Go Back
“over and over our song on my brain / I go back / we go back and I play it again / how far we go back is how forward / we’ll go”
For one sublime week in October 2019, Animal Collective played a brief run of shows in the Southwestern United States. Returning to their pre-Painting With form, Panda Bear, Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin debuted new jams, focusing their sets around unfamiliar, quizzically pre-formed ideas.  In fact, less than half of the songs played in their average setlists were old cuts, including a return of “For Reverend Green” (which they hadn’t played since 2006 when previewing Strawberry Jams) and Merriweather Post Pavilion-era favorites like “On a Highway” and “No More Runnin.”
Also included in some of the sets from this tour was the massive 20+ minute epic “Defeat (Not A Suite)” that had even earlier origins.

The year between The White Stripes and “Love Interruption” I turned 21, which seems like a momentous age when the worst thing that happens in your life is your favorite band calling it quits, or the best thing in your life that happens is when the guitarist from that band announces a solo tour. This year, between 31 and 32, I got a house, a Ph.D., a kid, and somehow in the mix with all of that Jack White is going to release two more solo records. Some things change and some things don’t change and some things have a way of looking different, while staying the same. 
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Here's 10 and 11 things about the end of The White Stripes and Jack White’s Blunderbuss.

One of my favorite jokes with Rachel, like all the best laughs you can share with your best friend, is one that is at my expense. Apparently, one time I was articulating why I got such a kick out of going to the AMC around the corner from our apartment. It was a dingy, grimy, disgusting, expensive shithole. Probably blustered because giant bucket of wet popcorn didn't sell it to her, I emoted proclaiming: "I love movies!" Or maybe that was something I giggled to myself while eating whirly pop corn on the couch at home during one of the million nights of this stupid pandemic I spent eating butter (I mean popcorn) and disappearing into some other world for 2 or so hours. Noticing the constant?

March 2020 to pretty much still right now, its been a bad time for movie junkies, especially movie theater movie junkies. You rats are my people. Movies got delayed, airborne pathogens became frightening. Shit, my movie hall shut down forever.

I'm not getting into it, but seeing a movie at the theater is, to me, infinitely better than seeing a movie at home. My tv is shitty, my sound system is shitty, and the people and dog I live with aren't always in the mood for that Eddie Van Halen guitar solo at the end of Twister to give them tinnitus. 

But at a movie theater the movie is projected on a wall three times the size of my house and the sound is pounded into your body with no regard for your well being. If you're me, there's a bucket of popcorn with "butter flavored oil" spoiling your lap just as efficiently as its spoiling your insides. All part of the charm!

I don't want to sell you on the theater though, you know how you feel and now you know how I feel. Because of the pandemic I didn't get to go to the theater anywhere near as much as I like to, but I did get to see some movies at the cinema and I also got to see some new movies from the comfort of my home. Lemme tell you what I liked this year!

​The Unholy - great Catholic horror, pretty original take on possession stories, but suffered from its PG-13 rating. Made way up for it in feating Cary Elwes as a villainous Bishop. 

Shin Godzilla (2016) - in my enthusiasm for Godzilla and Kong's showdown, I got caught up on some classic Toho Godzilla movies. The classic Godzilla Vs Kong sucked. The original Godzilla ruled! Several of the others, most memorably Son of Godzilla, were fun to watch. I didn't enjoy any as much as the bananas Shin Godzilla. Great monster design and also a satire of bureaucratic dipshittery that manages to not be a condescending and smug hammer over the head (looking at you Don't Look Up).

Godzilla vs Kong
Objectively speaking, this movie is pretty ass. Took the worst parts of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2018, I think) and turned the volume up to a thousand. The human dramas have no business getting more screentime than the monsters, and unlike KoTM, GvK doesn't have a battle royale of cinema's best beasts. The movie also exercised almost no restraint, unlike the excellent Godzilla (2014) which played like a horror flick.

Still, this was (until The Matrix 4 was announced anyway) my popcorn flick of the year. There's an awesome sacrilegious joke to be made about Godzilla v Kong coming out on Easter, but I can't think of it. I'll come back to it in three days? nah...

We happened to be on a family vacation for the holiday and while the HBO release wasn't my ideal first watch, it was fun for my brother (a Kong fan) to toll on me (a Godzilla fan) as the ape beat the everliving shit out of Godzilla. As a bonus, our small dogs play-fought during the entire picture, adding a little personal lore to the film.

We left DC Monday morning. Monday evening I was at the theater for a screening. I rewatched it last night and, again, its a bad movie, but there's like 50 minutes of monkey fights lizard with goofy mystical weapons and a robot Godzilla that turns sentient and evil and lots of punches and explosions and radiation breath. I'm a simple man. My needs are not complex. Godzilla vs Kong understands this.

Top Gun - is an old movie, but that didn't stop the Emagine Royal Oak from screening it this past July. Great movie. Even better on the big screen.

Pig - if this movie had come out in like 2013 I would have been insufferable about it. I really liked it, despite ending up being a much more quiet movie than the trailer's promise of Taken but its Nick Cage's pig instead of his daughter. The contemplation on food and grief and Nick Cage's simmering thousand mile stare was a surprising and rewarding movie experience. For me, you get one of the most hateful, devastating revenge ever delivered in a movie, and I'm not going to spoil it but it involves a quail. 

In the Heights - really fun! Maybe better than Hamilton? I've never seen the stage production, but the movie does a great job adapting to the "big" screen. Infectiously charming, though safely viewed from home.

No Time To Die
Sometimes the movie is who you see it with more than the movie. With lots of time on my hands, I got to revisit the Daniel Craig repertoire of Bond films; they're not that awesome. He's too heavy, too wooden. I want Roger Moore (keep the racism though thanks!) smirking, I want Pierce Brosnan being sexy and smirking. I don't want three movies in a row beginning with our hero being cajoled out of retirement. I think the Mission Impossible franchise kind of replaced Bond for me because of this: they're soulful and heavy at times without losing track of what the movies should be: a dude that can't die jumping in, out of, on to, or anywhere in the vicinity of an airplane in flight. 

All the same, I was excited for No Time to Die in 2019, then again in 2020, then early in 2021 before assuming it would, like Craig's relationship with the role, lose interest and become a joyless obligation. Coincidently, we were in Columbus for the debut weekend, and I got to see No Time to Die with my college roommates and brothers from other mothers Matt & Brent (hadn't seen a Bond with Brent since the midnight release of Quantum of Solace). We met early for wings and beers and the mood was light going into the theater.

Could have been the beers, or cracking jokes with my seat-mates, but NTTD seemed to have found the long-dormant sense of humor the franchise had abandoned. We laughed! We cheered at elaborate and occasionally (but only occasionally) brutal set-pieces! It was, for the most part - and certainly the first time in Craig's run - an espionage adventure! I loved it.

As for the controversial ending: look, a lot has been said about Bond (including two paragraph ago when I said Tom Cruise does it better despite Carly Simon's assertions) and I, like Craig, think its time for a break. Without even touching the character's identity, I think its clear the franchise is out of ideas. If the Broccoli estate wants to drop a lavish billion dollar period piece so a Cold War Bond can strut his stuff, sigh me up. Craig's open-hate of the role made the surprise finale, to me, a fitting end both to his take on Bond and also, possibly, a perfectly fine way to walk away from 007 all together. I felt so sure of that.

And then when JAMES BOND WILL RETURN scrolled across the bottom of the credits I cheered. So who knows what I think.

tick tick BOOM! - is a movie that could have sucked but would still be praiseworthy for Andrew Garfield's incredible, magnetic performance. Luckily, the movie doesn't suck.

Various Phantom of the Opera adaptations - speaking of musical theater, for whatever reason I went heavy into an old favorite. I hadn't seen any of the other adaptations of the story and really loved the grotesque Hammar version and also found Claude Reigns' take on the masked menace to be excellent.

The Matrix: Resurrections
The second Matrix movie came out when I was thirteen years old, which is the optimal age to enjoy the psuedo-psychology and 40 minute car/motorcycle/truck chase/kung-fu/gun fight sequence at the center of the movie. The Matrix trilogy was, appropriately, a sleepover favorite. Because of that, it is a series I've continued to be fond of, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect there to be another Matrix movie. It wasn't something I was craving, the closure in Revolutions made sense, and was satisfying enough no matter what people say about that movie.

So when they announced Resurrections I was measured in my excitement. I also didn't really believe it. But then it came out. At 3:00 a.m. eastern time. Do I blame the infant for staying up that late? Maybe. Do I blame trying to chase the same adrenaline high of those earlier Matrices movies for staying up that late? Maybe so. Nostalgia, like caffeine, is a hell of a drug. For that first viewing I think emerging from that movie, with pauses, around 6:30, as not bad, is a best possible outcome.

But in the (few) days that followed, I've continued to think about the ideas the movie introduced, the wrinkles in the storyline and functionality of the universe, the batshit performances by Jonathan Groff and Neil Patrick Harris (also: 8-Bit Christmas doesn't get its own entry on the list but deserves mention), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is unbelievable in this movie, or, the wholesome reunion of Neo & Trinity during this ear of Keanuassance.

I think its great. I can't wait to see it again, and I hope I get a chance on the big screen.

The French Dispatch
I revisited the Wes Anderson expanded universe this year and found myself not as fond of all of his movies as I'd used to be, but even more fond of a few. Grand Budapest Hotel I regard now as a favorite; Royal Tannenbaums remains an all-time classic; Moonrise Kingdom lost some of its charms, and so on.

I entered the French Dispatch the way I enter most things I watch now - as something to do while feeding Ben a bottle or trying to rock him to sleep at 12:52 a.m. My expectations were low because, like many movies, The French Dispatch had been delayed far beyond its original announcement. 

Its the most Wes Anderson movie Wes Anderson has made. Each shot is an intricate diorama of twee detail, the scenes have as much life as the revolving door of Anderson's usual band of players. The movie itself gets inventive with the format, telling three vignettes which themselves are narrated - to other characters and the viewers as well while pausing to connect with the overarching narrative (the passing of the titular magazine's editor) and occasionally breaking the fourth wall. It winks at the viewers and giggles at its own cleverness, but not in a smug way.

The stories The French Dispatch tells are fun, curious, and the visual language of the film is like candy for your eyes. A real pleasant surprise. Maybe my best surprise of the year.

It was a cliché to talk about the 2020-ness of 2020, so I'm loath to mention that 2021 kept up with that same energy. But, as the previous trip around the sun was, this too was a strange year. Like all facets of life, my music listening habits were askew. Unlike 2020's hundreds of mileage spent listening to music on long, hot runs, my legs just didn't have it in me this year. Or when they did, I wanted to listen to podcasts like a big dork. The benefit to listening to tons of music pods is you can think about music a ton, but the downside is you spend less time listening to music. And the tastemakers on your pod end up impacting what you listen to. I guess that's not really a downside so much as an interesting observation. Last year I started listening to Steven Hyden & Ian Cohen's Indiecast pod, and Cohen's AOTY ended up also being mine. That was only a taste - my whole top ten (spoiler alert) is more or less Cohencore, which is a joke that like 12 people on the internet would get. Pods! Community!

Anyway, I want to run through some albums I enjoyed (and, in the case of Jan-August, vaguely remember enjoying) and talk about what was going on that month as to excuse how it seems like I only listened to fourteen new things this year.

​This is the one where I try to tell you we were wrong about Nickelback. If you aren’t receptive to that I implore you to keep reading. Twenty years into this century is long enough to draw out a new millennium’s malaise of ironic, self-sabotaging and arbitrary dislike of, well, anything. But perhaps nothing in music world is as universally loathed as Nickelback’s 2001 album Silver Side Up. For the band, it was an exciting and enormous breakout. For fans, it was the very end of their hard rock days, a final rattle before setting into more pop country and southern rock soundscapes on their more insipid, less fun work that is worthy of the disdain. “Photograph”? Garbage. Silver Side Up? Perfect hard rock album. Let’s go.
Despite what all your Tool’s or Smashing Pumpkins might suggest rock doesn’t need to be “smart,” I love Melon Collie as much as your average music fan, but damn, is rock supposed to be difficult? Despite the utterly indifference of a Julian Casablancas with long hair, dark sunglasses and a leather jacket strutting in their neat little outfits, isn’t the point of rock music that shlubby dudes in bad jeans and a ringer t-shirt get to be cool? I don’t want to relitigate Gen X’s war against commercialism but aren’t we, mostly, happy when our rock and roll bands get songs in tv ads? I couldn’t give a shit that The Raconteurs are trying to sell me an electric car, I get to hear “Salute Your Solution” during daytime tv now! Yes, The White Stripes playing little dive bars across the Midwest is more “cool” than seeing an alterative rock radio superstar group play a solid out sporting arena, but wouldn’t you rather riffs bounce off of the widest radius possible before slamming back into your brain? I’ll put it like this: The Beatles don’t make Revolver until they make “Hold Your Hand” first.
And now that I’ve evoked The Beatles I can give our good Canadian friends Nickelback their due. Similar to the lads from Liverpool, Nickelback are four dudes: two brothers Chad and Mike Kroeger (lead guitar and vocals, bass respectively) and two Ryans, Peake (rhythm guitar) and Vikedal (drums). Silver Side Up was their third album and was as inescapable as their massive single, “How You Remind Me,” released in June, ahead of the album’s September 11, 2001 release date.
Its funny to celebrate the milestone this album is crossing, and its even funnier to “celebrate” Nickelback. As the most hated band in rock and roll music, the idea of praise for their last true hard rock record seems as foreign as a time before Chad Kroeger’s weird ramen noodle hair was memed into oblivion. Not for nothing, the gang seems to have a pretty positive attitude about their universal hatred. Before Silver Side Up, they were an indistinguishable hard rock band from Canada. After, they slid into alternative pop country band.
In its moment, Silver Side Up neatly argues against the cool guy garage band rock moment in New York, Detroit, and elsewhere. Similarly, it makes for a nice antithesis to Radiohead’s dour and experimental Kid A/Amnesiac one-two punch. Instead of innovating, or instead of being challenging, Nickelback dared to do something conventional. This is not to say they are in a class of their own, but for every “How You Remind Me” there’s a dozen “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd or “Wasting My Time” by Default. Both totally forgettable songs compared to what I believe is the single best rock song of the first decade of the new millennium. You know that Elvis album, “10,000 fans can’t be wrong?” “How You Remind Me” sold a million units, and a million people definitely can’t be wrong.
A counter-history on this band and this album is a fool’s errand though: you’ve already decided how you feel, and for better and for worse, Nickelback put the lightening in a bottle and moved on with their ridiculously successful career after Silver Side Up. So much for not making it as a wise man! We, popular culture, have a fixed opinion on this band and I can only suggest you reconsider, and give it a fair shake. There’s ten good rock songs, which is all anybody should expect from a rock record.
For a while, I wondered if sounding like a good rock song was different than being a good rock song. Twenty years with Silver Side Up presents an answer: a hard rock, riff heavy collection of unpretentious songs, made and presented in total earnest is not only the most perfect form of “Dudes Rock,” it is also the most perfect form of how fun, if not a little mindless, rock music can, and should be.
In “Good Times Gone,” the album closer, Kroeger asks, “where the good times gone? / all the stupid fun / and all that shit we’ve done / where the good times gone?” Man, they’re right in front of you. And in an assessment of Nickelback’s legacy (weird sentence to write I know) those good times are both before and ahead of Silver Side Up. The album is six times platinum in the United States. Every album they’ve released since has been huge and somehow, Nickelback still is a pop culture punching bag. I hate to evoke the same argumentative tactics I did in middle school, which coincidently was where I was at in my life when I bought Silver Side Up on CD, but maybe everybody shits on Kroeger and crew because they’re jealous! In “Woke Up This Morning,” which has as good a guitar riff as anything Jimmy Page every played, Nickelback laments: “I’m hating all of this,” and bemoans “I felt like shit when I woke up this morning.”
That song is more than likely another song about a former flame. But, what if the “I” in that song is actually one of Nickelback’s million antagonists preemptively calling the band dead on arrival: “I paid my last respects this morning on an early grave / already said goodbye nothing left to say” is as good a write off as anything else said about this band. Read that way, “Woke Up This Morning” holds a mirror up to the scores of joyless haters. Having to face yourself – “a loser all my life I’m not about to change / if you don’t like it, there’s the door nobody made you stay” – would make me feel like shit too.
This is to say in order to be in favor of Silver Side Up you also have to be against the concept of “guilty pleasures.” “Money Bought” describes a character who “has a toke and makes a joke about the alley man / never pleasured from the treasure in a garbage can.” Maybe its damning by faint praise, but I believe Nickelback dares us to consider the alternative: finding pleasure from “the treasure in the garbage can.” Not that an album peaking at number two (behind friggin’ Jay Z’s The Blueprint) after being released on the literal worst day in modern American history could really be considered garbage or anything.
In Silver Side Up we are given tales of scorned lovers, a ballad about a man who has lost it all, a Johnny Cash-meets-Megadeth domestic abuse revenge fantasy, and the biggest rock song of the 21st century. The songs are good, they come and go, never once outstaying their welcome. There’s a tight cohesion track and track, and the focus – despite the tone of each song – remains steady. These four dudes wanted to make us a rock record and they did exactly that. Who the hell are we to reject that?
 

​JAY-Z is as tied to New York City as the signature baseball team. In “Empire State of Mind” he says, “I can make a Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can” and the NY embossed over hard fabric is as much a signifier of Shawn Carter as the blue tones shading The Blueprint’s album art. JAY-Z is also as tied to New York City as the hometown heroes in Madison Square Garden, again JAY-Z raps: “sitting courtside Knicks & Nets give me high-fives.” This is, after all, where he’s from.
It is utter coincidence that the best album from New York’s best rapper was released on New York’s worst day. The worldwide reputation of the city remains tied to JAY-Z’s career lyrically, narratively, and in the instance of the September 11, 2001 release of The Blueprint, also in tragedy. Mournfully JAY-Z sings, “ain’t no love, in the heart of the city / I said where’s the love? / ain’t no love, in the heart of town”, but in the shaken spirit of New Yorkers in the days, weeks, and months that followed the collapse of The World Trade Center, much of that love was to be found among New Yorkers.
In The Blueprint JAY-Z is doing what JAY-Z does best: talking story about the grimy life of street hustlers and gangsters. In a tender performance from The Concert For New York City, a benefit concert for first responders just over a month after the September 11th terrorist attacks “Ain’t No Love (In the Heart of the City)” morphs into a celebration of finding each other in previously unimaginable hatred and violence. Coincidently, the concert recording (which also featured an acoustic performance of “IZZO (HOVA)” ala the MTV Unplugged session) was my gateway to JAY-Z, and really, all hip hop. Strange as it may seem, I can’t help but merge these seemingly unrelated events: the release of JAY-Z’s sixth studio album and September 11th both as remember exactly where you were when, and yet, I’m in my grandmother’s van listening to a CD with a guy called JAY-Z orating “thanks for comin’ out tonight / you coulda been anywhere in the world, but you’re here with me / I appreciate that”. Having not grown up with hip-hop I’d never heard anything like that before, just a simple ad lib that, on the album is a simple break from the evisceration of “Takeover” and acts as a bridge into the more pop R&B “Girls, Girls, Girls”.
But in the context of that benefit concert, it is a great moment of hospitality from the genre’s most gifted and, in this instance, generous emcee.
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The Blueprint opens like any good epic with a recap. “The Ruler’s Back” fills in the blanks since 2000’s posse album The Dynasty: Roc La Familia and JAY-Z’s last proper solo album Vol. 3 … Life and Times of S. Carter (1999). He sounds familiar, ad libbing “I wanna thank everybody out there for they purchase / we surely appreciate it” which JAY-Z does similarly on Vol. 3, and like a good host, gives a preview: “what you about to witness is my thoughts (just my thoughts, man) / right or wrong / just what I was feelin’ at the time / you ever felt like this, vibe with me.” JAY-Z also comes out sounding invigorated: “Gather ‘round, hustlers, that’s if you still livin’.” And then, as promised, the ruler shows his face.
This first face is a mean one. We bounce into a Kanye West-produced Doors sampling battle rap to put Nas, and everybody else barely worth half a bar, to bed for good. Instead of thinking about JAY-Z from a historical perspective, or trying to read The Blueprint narratively, you simply could read the lyrics to every single bar in “Takeover” to understand why this was the most important album of 2001 and while it remains one of the genre’s most important albums 20 years later. JAY-Z is a mean mother fucker, but he’s also an extremely skillful and artful mother fucker.

​“Takeover” somehow isn’t even the third best Kanye joint JAY-Z raps on, but “IZZO (HOVA)” is easily tied for best. (Even today) I wouldn’t want to pigeon hole the guy, but Kanye West is such a good producer and its so obvious in the way he twists JAY-Z’s hustler street smart businessman lyrics around a radio-friendly beat. The sample is warm, captures the grandiosity of autobiographical moments that would fit in an ensemble number in a musical: “Hov is back, life stories told through rap / n****s acting like I sold you crack / like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov did that / so hopefully you won’t have to go through that.” Blueprint’s worldbuilding somehow both projects JAY-Z into the future as a money-minded mogul and sets the scenes of his Reasonable Doubt-era come up. In anybody else’s hands it would smack of inauthenticity, but deftly, JAY-Z sells “I was raised in the projects, roaches and rats / smokers out back selling’ they mama’s sofa” as a real scene, a necessary scene so we can cheer along with him: “what else can I say about dude? I gets busy.”
If “IZZO” dips its toe in pop rap territory, the sometimes cringey “Girls, Girls, Girls” is an absolute pop R&B megahit. Some of the lyrics haven’t aged as well as others, but you gotta belly laugh when JAY-Z raps in French: “ma cherie amour, tu es belle / merci, you’re fine as fuck, but you giving me hell.” You gotta wonder how often this one gets played in the Carter/Knowles household, but as a hot song of the summer contenders, “Girls, Girls, Girls” transcends its deeply flawed concept. Plus, friggin’ Q-Tip pops up for the chorus. What more can you ask for?

​“U Don’t Know” gets The Blueprint back into battle rap territory and on a personal note, opens up my all time favorite genre of JAY-Z lyric: him doing math. Literally every line on the skittering big precision chipmunk soul beat Just Blaze puts together is memorable, but as a thesis statement JAY-Z’s last verse really puts one era of the hungry hustler to bed before Black Album’s maximalist braggadocio (what JAY-Z will go on to mythology in Blueprint 3 with: “used to rock a throwback, ballin’ on the corner / now I rock a tailored suit lookin’ like an owner.”). He raps with the ferocity:
                        I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in Hell
                        I am a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a whale
                        I was born to get cake, move on and switch states
                        Cop the coupe with the roof gone and switch places
                        Was born to dictate, never follow orders, dick face
                        Get your shit straight, fucker, this is Big JAY-Z.
The demand is simple and even easier to follow. “Hola’ Hovito” dials back the power in favor for what can be best described as Timbland’s best effort at a Dr. Dre g-funk SoCal production. It’s a better sonic experiment than the eastern tones of “Jigga that N***a” (which is better captured in Blueprint 2’s “The Bounce” in 2002) but both provide bridges between the better songs in the mix.

And as far as better songs go, none soar as high as the untouchable “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” which returns to the same well of radio ready mega rap hits The Blueprint opens with. Another autobiographical track, “Heart of the City” closes the gap with “The Rule’s Back,” once again setting the scene. “now every day I wake up / somebody’s got a problem with Hov? / What’s up? Y’all n****s all fed up ‘cause I got a little cheddar / and my record’s movin’ out the store?” The whole song goes in with memorable lines, and opens up the album for the next few more mellow, more autobiographical tracks.
“Never Change,” for example, brings back the chipmunk soul and sees a reflective JAY-Z-Z rapping about how he’s “still fuckin’ with crime, ‘cause crime pays” and dispensing wisdom: “we all fish, better teach your folk / give him money to eat, the next week he’s broke / ‘cause when you sleep, he’s reachin’ for your throat.” Or, “Song Cry” gives listeners a preview of the self-critical 4:44 with a downright majestic soliloquy about infidelity: “It was the cheese, helped them bitches get amnesia quick / I used to cut up they buddies, now they sayin’ they love me.” Its pretty wild to jump from “U Don’t Know” to the vulnerability on display here: “shit, I’ve got to live with the fact I did you wrong forever.” It’s a poem, man.
“All I Need” is the lesser of the Carter-family hits that make use of Tupac’s “Me and My Girlfriend” and begins the falling action of The Blueprint, which doesn’t end as strong as it does jump out of the gates. “Renegade” rolls out Eminem, and if not for the home and home co-headlining tour JAY-Z and Em did in Detroit and New York in 2010, I’d write off entirely. Eminem kind of sucks, but you might like this song. Structurally its interesting to see these two trade verses off twice; it’s a long song, and its weird for JAY-Z to give Eminem the last word, but at least Em is set up to call himself “a regular modern-day Shakespeare” setting up corny English teachers (yours, truly) to bring rap music in the classroom forever.
Is “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)” technically a title track? It feels like the credits roll on a movie, and The Blueprint plays through highs and lows scene-to-scene like a feature film, so it’s a nice moment of closure for JAY-Z-Z’s clam recounting of the family members off stage supporting him in the wings. We hear about Ti-Ti, who JAY-Z would literally kiss on the forehead, we hear about the origins of the rapper: “Clark sought me out, Dame believed … Reasonable Dout classic, shoulda went triple” but ultimately fixates on, and returns to Gloria Carter, the titular Momma.
Of course, the movies ends. JAY-Z raps: “Police pursued me, chased, cuffed, subdued me / talked to me rudely ‘cause I’m young, rich, and I’m black and living a / movie.”
 
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What’s funny about The Blueprint is how hard it sounds like JAY-Z is trying to convince listeners, record labels, and himself, how classic the album is, how established he is as an artist and a rapper. This is in tension with lyrics boasting about transcending the streets and rap music. In “Heart of the City,” for example, JAY-Z challenges: “Look, scrapper, I got nephews to look after / I’m not lookin’ at you dudes, I’m lookin’ past ya / I thought I told you characters I’m not a rapper / can I live? / I told you ’96 I came to take this shit and I did / handle my biz.” The both-and really makes JAY-Z a vital voice in his own movie: calling back “Can I Live?” from Reasonable Doubt in order to argue he’s succeeded his way out of the game, in the middle of what is obviously the biggest hit single from his current album? Hilarious.
JAY-Z of course goes on to make an ill received sequel to Blueprint before utterly exploding every possible metric for hip-hop success with The Black Album and then lists into his late-career period with some occasionally exciting, often uninspired albums. Frozen in time, as September 2001 already is, The Blueprint really gives a picture of a JAY-Z on what we know to be an early ascent, seemingly about to max out. We’re in year 25 of JAY-Z’s career, and he hasn’t really released a piece of shit album yet, and yet, among those 13 releases, there are still obvious highlights. That’s pretty good sign for a guy who’s “music bangin’ like vatos locos,” who “got rap in a chokehold” (You know I had to sneak some JAY-Z rapping in Spanish on y’all).
One last interesting thing to note in the years of JAY-Z’s late-late career (including, sadly, two washed-ass verses on the two least interesting prestige rap records of 2021, Kanye’s Donda and Drake’s Certified Lover Boy) is how gracefully The Blueprint has, unlike a lot of JAY-Z’s current works, aged. The hottest song on the album is built on a sample from The Doors, who were well-established as dad-rock mid to bottom shelf music in the early aughts. “Five to One” is classic rock canon. In 2021, JAY-Z was admitted into the rock and roll half of fame is now his own piece of classic rock canon. Do we call JAY-Z dad rap the same way we call Wilco dad rock? Maybe, but I certainly won’t be as foul-mouthed around my little man.
A reflection on The Blueprint could really be short work: the best of JAY-Z’s large bag of tricks come out in full force, including flows, rhyme and lyric structures, his team of extremely gifted producers. You’ve got like five of JAY-Z’s top ten best on this album. JAY-Z’s own daughter is named after this album, so if we were to be skeptical of The Blueprint’s 20 year legacy we might look no further than Shawn Carter’s nine year old daughter.
But maybe the easiest way to ponder The Blueprint’s place in the history books would be to listen to literally any of album’s 13 tracks and decide if we’ve heard anything quite as good sense?
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I’ll save you the trouble: we have not.